Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  “Legatus? Even if they’d sent an RTA message as soon as they got Campbell’s note, the ships would need to have been perfectly positioned!”

  “Then we got lucky,” Kelly concluded. “What are they doing?”

  “Accelerating towards the pirates,” he answered. “Ma’am…they’re freighters. What can they be planning on doing?”

  “I don’t know. But they do,” she told him. “And they seem willing to pick that fight. For now, we watch. Whoever they are, they’ve volunteered themselves as the distraction Mage Soprano needs.”

  She switched open an intercom channel.

  “Mike, what’s the status on the shuttles?”

  “We’re ready to go,” he replied. “We’ve got a stack of spares flying drone-mode with us, too, but remember they’ll see you and the decoys as soon as we launch.”

  “I know,” Kelly confirmed. Wu was currently hiding the entire ship, but she was on the flight deck of Kelzin’s assault shuttle. To hide the three shuttles was going to take all three of Red Falcon’s remaining Mages, and Kelly LaMonte was going to send both of her lovers into harm’s way.

  “I’ll give you the signal when the time is right,” she continued. “Two more hours, give or take.”

  “We’ll bring them all home, Kelly. I promise.”

  “You’ll bring yourselves home, too,” she ordered.

  “I included us in ‘them all,’” he told her with a chuckle.

  “Okay, now, that is really weird.”

  “Jeeves?” Kelly asked in cheerful exasperation. Whatever he was seeing was almost certainly valuable, but she would give quite a bit for prompt information.

  “Our potentially-Legatan-friends just started having babies,” the gunner finally replied. “They just spat out a dozen new drive signatures…and there they go again.”

  Kelly looked at the data.

  “And again,” she murmured. “That’s…a gravity-rib rotation cycle for a big freighter like that. Every twenty-five seconds. What are they doing?”

  “And again,” Jeeves agreed. “Forty-eight new drive signatures. Fusion torches, same as the freighters, but much smaller. Pulling five gees apiece…and there’s another twelve.”

  Sixty smaller engine signatures. That was…really weird.

  “Do you have a mass estimate?” Kelly asked.

  “Bang on a hundred thousand tons apiece. And there’s another twelve. Seventy-two of them.”

  Something was ringing a bell. A hundred-thousand-ton spacecraft, hidden under the ribs of a freighter…

  “Son of a bitch,” Kelly swore. “Gunships. Jeeves, do they match the profile for Legatan gunships?”

  Red Falcon’s bridge was silent for several seconds.

  “Yes,” he concluded. “Older units, most likely, but yes. What the hell?”

  “Blue Jay was hired to transport gunships once,” she told him. “We had eight of them tucked away under the gravity ribs. We were just moving them, though; these guys are rigged out to deploy them, probably using the ribs themselves as an orbital hook for their initial velocity.

  “Hence one batch of them each rotation cycle,” Jeeves agreed. “Damn. Jay was a Venice class, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “These guys are Troubadour class, or of much the same size. Six ribs, ten megatons. They could be carrying a lot of these things.”

  “There’s another squadron,” Kelly noted. Eighty-four gunships were now in space, adjusting accelerations to match velocities with each other as they closed with the pirates. “Any idea when they’ll be in range?”

  Jeeves shook his head.

  “Depends on what they’re carrying. LSDS uses either the Phoenix VII or their home-built Excalibur missile. Both would be in range already.

  “If they’re using general-market missiles, though, a Rapier equivalent…they’ll range around eight minutes before Skavar and Soprano make contact. Just enough time to land a salvo before we board.”

  Kelly shook her head.

  “That’s the perfect distraction for our people,” she noted.

  “Assuming they don’t accidentally blow the Captain to hell.”

  “Assuming that,” she agreed.

  43

  Locked back in his room, David was surprised to realize he still had access to Bleeding Sapphire’s sensors. He couldn’t change anything about them, but he could at least access the feed—and his wrist-comp had a collection of programs he’d acquired over the years.

  With both of those, it took him just under five minutes to identify the four strange ships as Troubadour-class heavy freighters. Twelve megatons fully loaded, so the mass that Sapphire was picking up suggested that they only carried partial loads.

  But also, he noted, meant they were carrying far more cargo than would make sense if they’d shown up to loot Azure Gauntlet. If he’d been coming to scavenge something of value from what he believed to be a derelict ship, he’d either have brought an actual refit ship to try and make it flyable again, or he’d have brought a small amount of cutting gear and left as much cargo space as possible to fill with pieces of starship.

  Plus, well, a Troubadour had no business intentionally flying in the direction of a flotilla of armed ships, no matter how many friends she’d brought. The four ships had maybe thirty or so anti-missile turrets between them. That was it.

  And then the gunships started launching. David worked out what they had to be almost instantly, watching their numbers continue to grow as he realized what was going on.

  LMID was there, it appeared. That was…potentially awkward. They were about as likely to vaporize him as the Navy was, and they probably didn’t even know he was aboard. The Navy, hopefully, did.

  Eighty-four gunships were now heading toward him, and he could do the math easily enough. That was roughly a thousand missile launchers, enough to give the Legacy’s fleet an ugly hangover.

  The Legacy’s fleet probably had a slight edge, mostly in that they were flying actual starships with armor and defenses. The Legatans, though, were almost certainly veteran military crews.

  Either way, it was starting to look more and more like David Rice needed to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Anywhere that wasn’t locked in the guest quarters aboard a destroyer that was about to run into more enemies than its crew realized.

  Now if only there were an easy way for him to escape…

  While David was no hacker or software expert—he’d left that to James Kellers and Kelly LaMonte in recent years—his collection of programs acquired over the years included several that were designed for brute-force cracking.

  He’d opened locked doors with them in the past to get out of tight spots or into places he wasn’t supposed to be, so he was reasonably confident they’d get him through the door.

  He was, in fact, confident enough that he’d been trying for over half an hour when he finally accepted that no, it wasn’t going to work. He was probably lucky that he hadn’t triggered an alarm.

  Looking back at Bleeding Sapphire’s sensor feed, he saw the pirate fleet had opened fire several minutes before. Just two salvos, a probe to see how significant the gunships’ missile defenses were.

  If he had full access to the destroyer’s sensors, he could probably have identified the gunship class. With only the “guest feed,” he couldn’t tell…but he suspected that the pirates were going to be surprised by the lack of effectiveness of their missiles.

  If Vandella-Howard’s people took full advantage of their possession of antimatter missiles, they could take out the entire incoming gunship force without losses. But every second they waited to see how their first salvoes did was a second closer to the gunships’ range.

  David needed to get out of this room.

  If software and smarts weren’t going to do it, then at least he had brute force on his side.

  He pulled a chair over to the door to balance on and positioned himself carefully. His hip had been reinforced, but not enough to take the full force of his leg at m
aximum strength.

  His new knee, however, was part of the cybernetic. Holding himself carefully in place, he kicked from the knee, a snap forward of his booted foot that blurred even to his eyes.

  He winced. He’d left a visible dent in the metal door next to the lock, but it was still intact. The force had pushed him off-balance, but he’d managed to stay upright, and he was uninjured.

  No one came running to see what the noise was, either.

  That was enough. He kicked the door again. And again.

  It took five tries and his boot was half-wrecked by the time he was done, but the insanely overpowered cyber-limb the Legatans had given him smashed the door open. The corridor beyond was empty and he inhaled deeply as he considered his options.

  His guest access happily disgorged a basic map of the ship and a “you are here.” The ships Tau Ceti built for export were much the same as the ships they’d built for the Navy in his long-ago days of military service.

  He could find the shuttle bay. He could fly a shuttle.

  And with the missile duel that was about to start, he might well get off the ship he’d led into a trap before it killed him.

  Bleeding Sapphire might be crewed by pirates, mercenaries and criminals, but they at least understood battle stations. The corridors were empty as David made his way down to the shuttle bay.

  That area, however, was much less empty. Sapphire’s shuttles were civilian models, not assault craft, but they’d all been retrofitted with various types of weaponry. Deck crews were fueling and arming them, presumably preparing them for potential boarding operations against either the incoming impromptu carriers or the Gauntlet.

  The deck crews were the first people he’d seen since escaping his quarters, and their appearance really drove home what kind of vessel he was on. Bleeding Sapphire’s corridors were clean and her systems well maintained; she didn’t live down to his mental image of a pirate ship at all.

  Her crew, however, were dressed in a motley collection of clothing that seemed intentionally picked to be as ununiform as possible. Vac-suits on the flight crews were painted with strange symbols and murals; the deck crews wore bright colors and only barely seemed to refrain from frills and tassels that would be actively dangerous in this work.

  And every last person in the shuttle bay was armed. Everything from simple pistols worn at the belt to assault carbines strapped to backs. If David was spotted, he was probably going to die very, very quickly.

  It wasn’t like there were any stunners out there, after all.

  “We got one,” somebody announced loudly, to cheers in the open space. “Don’t know who these idiots are, but the missiles blew one of them to hell.”

  The cheers petered off after a moment.

  “Didn’t we just fire the entire fleet’s launchers at a bunch of basically corvettes?” somebody asked. “Shouldn’t we have got, well, more than one?”

  The shuttle bay was very silent.

  “Bridge says we’re opening fire again,” the first speaker replied after a few moments. “So, shut your beaks and get back to work. If the lady says we’re going to board and retrieve Azure Gauntlet, that’s all we need to worry about. Got it?”

  As the crews returned to work, David slowly worked his way around the outside of the bay. One of the shuttles was facing away from the others, its boarding ramp close enough to a pile of crates that he was pretty sure he could board without being seen—and if he was seen, he could probably get to the pilot’s console before anyone managed to catch him.

  Reaching the final set of crates, he realized there was a new commotion back at the entrance he’d come through. Three of Vandella-Howard’s massive bodyguards had emerged into the shuttle bay, the leader studying his wrist-comp and ignoring the questions being asked by the shuttle bay crew.

  He looked up from his wrist-comp and pointed directly at David.

  “He’s over there!”

  David swore. What was… He looked at his wrist-comp, still showing him the sensor feed from the destroyer’s guest network.

  Of course they could track his comp while he was tied into that network. He cursed himself for an idiot and ran for the shuttle.

  It turned out, thankfully, that Vandella-Howard’s bodyguards did have stunguns.

  David was still twitching when the human mountains dragged him back into the observation deck, his hands cuffed in front of him, and tossed him on the floor.

  “You know,” the blonde lawyer told him coldly, “it really doesn’t help convince me that you didn’t betray me when you try to steal a shuttle and run.”

  “I have surprisingly little faith in the ability of your pirates to fight off the Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate,” David gasped out, struggling to his knees.

  Vandella-Howard apparently hadn’t given her bodyguard the hand cannon back. She was seated now, with the massive black pistol sitting on her lap.

  “So, you do know who has decided to interfere,” she noted. “Keep digging, Captain Rice.”

  “I don’t know why they’re here now or where they got the data,” he pointed out. “I just know that LMID had been experimenting with using freighters to transport gunships and that those are definitely Legatan gunships.”

  “Are they, now?” she asked sweetly. “Doesn’t the LSDF use antimatter missiles? These idiots appeared to have launched a lovely salvo of fusion missiles at my fleet.”

  She gestured and a middle-aged man in a plain shipsuit activated a project display, showing the main sensor feed. The gunship formation had taken losses, but there will still over seventy gunships in play, now accelerating back toward their carriers.

  There were also hundreds of missiles in space. Probably close to a thousand, enough to cause serious damage to the Legacy fleet. Even with fusion-drive weapons.

  He sighed.

  “If you were running a covert operation in Protectorate space, would you arm your ships with antimatter missiles?” he asked. “They want it to look like people like you killed their targets. Anything they destroy, they want Mars to write off as pirates.”

  “An interesting chain of logic,” she observed. “They’re going to make quite a mess of my lighter ships, I suspect, and have done a surprisingly good job of shooting down our missiles.”

  David shrugged.

  “How many of your missile people are vets?” he asked bluntly. “How many of them know how to use the electronic warfare systems on their Phoenix VIIs to their full potential?

  “You might have the second-best missiles in the galaxy, but they’re badly degraded if your people don’t know how to use them. Where these guys are using a Rapier-equivalent—but they know what they’re doing.”

  Vandella-Howard grunted. She hadn’t picked up the gun yet, so he figured he wasn’t currently marked for death, but he wasn’t being uncuffed or helped to stand, either.

  “Why are they accelerating away from us?” she asked the crewman standing nearby. “Wouldn’t they want to close?”

  “They only have a few missiles per launcher,” David told her before the crewman could speak. “Once they’ve emptied those magazines, they want to fall back on the freighters. They’ll do what damage they can and then jump out. Given your people’s demonstrated competence, they may not leave much of your fleet when they do.”

  The lawyer snarled.

  “And what would you have done?” she snapped.

  “Opened fire with antimatter missiles as soon as I realized they were dropping gunships,” he replied. “Possibly even lasers. Your SDSes have big beams; you might have been able to cause them headaches even at this range.

  “You probably wouldn’t have stopped them deploying most of the gunships, but without motherships, they have no way home—and I doubt they’re feeling particularly suicidal.”

  “And now we just eat their best shot and they fly away?” Vandella-Howard asked, her voice surprisingly clinical. She shifted moods from angered to calm far too quickly for David’s peace of mind.
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  “Most of your ships have gravity runes,” he pointed out. “You could almost certainly close with them, bleed them. You’d lose more of your own ships in the process, though.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “You’ve been setting us up from the beginning.”

  “God, I do not fucking care what you do at this point,” David snapped. “You’re going to get yourselves killed because you’re so impressed with the firepower you’ve assembled, you didn’t bother to make sure your people could actually use it.

  “Those gunships? They’re no match for your fleet. But your people have screwed this up so badly that you’re going to get hammered and they’re going to extract three-quarters or more of their ships after the strike is over.

  “There is no way in hell that I am planning to die with you, Sarah Vandella-Howard,” he told her. “You’re trying to rebuild Mikhail Azure’s empire on the backs of the same murderers and slavers he built it on. You want to reclaim and rebuild his legacy—and I want to see that same legacy burnt to the ground.”

  He struggled to his feet, glaring at her.

  “If you live, you will bring misery and death to a hundred worlds for your own profit,” he continued. “If the Legatans kill you, I will laugh, even if I have to die with you. All you ever had to do was decide that the will of a megalomaniacal crime lord wasn’t legally binding on your firm. Instead, you did this.”

  He gestured around them.

  Vandella-Howard giggled. The sound made her appear even younger than she regularly looked, and she grinned at him.

  “Such fire,” she remarked. “Such passion. I’m hardly surprised at your opinion of my plans, Captain Rice. I’m not even surprised that you’ve betrayed me, one way or another. I do have to wonder how you managed to get the Legatans to do your dirty work.”

  “I didn’t!” he snapped. “If I’d thought I could have, I would! But these idiots showed up all on their own.”